Director's Cut

Today our group is working on the "Director's Cut" alternate ending for our animation. This involves a different shot of a pen turning on a computer. I animated this new shot in Maya:

Post Production

At the end of our meeting on Friday, the group had several different rendered shots/scenes assembled in Premiere. I then took this video and added some post processing (e.g. freeze frames, title cards, etc.) using iMovie. I also used GarageBand to put together a preliminary soundtrack. I mostly used music from my iTunes library, and sound effects I found on the web. I was able to use one or two sound effects that are built in to GarageBand, and I got a sound effects CD from the OSU library that had a few useful things on it (like the sound of the flies buzzing). This post-production stuff is fun, but the timings and video effects will have to be done over again once we have our fully-finalized renderings from Maya.

I added a screenshot from GarageBand and from iMovie to this post. The interfaces are relatively straightforward, but I spend quite a bit of time today learning some of the nuances.

The Plane Sequence

This past Friday during our group meeting at ACCAD, I animated and rendered the sequence in which the plane flies and cuts the string holding up the pen. This involved a lot of experimentation with camera angles and movement. I think being a film-nerd helped me choose an angle and a push-in movement that isn't too jarring to the viewer. Here's a video clip of what I came up with:

Kickstarting the Machine

Our Rube Goldberg machine begins with an alarm clock ringing, and its hammer striking a match. Today I procedurally animated the motion of the alarm clock hands, the movement of its hammer, the vibration of the clock when it goes off, and the burst of flame that it causes. The flame is achieved via Maya's built in fire effect, and it's "density" attribute is tweaked inside of an animation expression to make the flame begin just after the hammer begins moving. Here's a fully-rendered look at what I've just described:

Fly Animation Complete

After making good progress last week with an initial fly swarming animation, I was able to finalize things this week. First I wrote a MEL script that imported Michael's fly model in place of the spheres that I was originally using. I added some randomized rotation to the individual flies' orientation, so that they look more natural and aren't all always facing the same direction. Michael's model included a "flap" attribute that controlled the angle of the wings, and so I modified the expression to control those values with a sinusoid. I found the MEL "linstep" command to be extremely useful here, because it automatically scales values in to the range 0 to 1. A playblast of the finalized fly animation is shown below.

I also continued work on modeling the neighboring house for our animation. I used Maya's paint effects to create some trees and shrubs: